UNIPRESS - Summary of New Book on UPI History

(Two veteran United Press International editors have completed a history of UP-UPI that covers most of the 20th century. Publication is pending. The authors, Richard Harnett and Billy Ferguson, spent a total of 76 years with the worldwide news agency. Harnett joined United Press in 1951 in San Francisco and worked there as a reporter, editor, special writer and San Francisco bureau manager. He retired in 1997. Harnett published Wirespeak, Codes and Jargon of the News Business in 1997. He lives with his wife, Joyce, in San Mateo, Calif. Ferguson spent 40 years with UP-UPI, starting as a sports writer in the Atlanta bureau and winding up as UPI's managing editor. In between, he sampled much of what the wire service had to offer. He covered state legislatures, racial unrest in the South, the Apollo 11 landing on the moon and the development of UPI broadcast services. He lives with his wife, Betty, in Evanston, Ill.)

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Here's is a summary of UNIPRESS: The World's Most Exciting News Service:

The seeds of United Press International were planted in two sprawling
California estates early in the 20th century.

Publishers E.W. Scripps and William Randolph Hearst were as
different in most ways as were the two lavish retreats they built to
memorialize their success: Scripps' dusty Miromar Ranch in the desert near
San Diego and Hearst's gaudy palace at San Simeon.

But the two men shared a vision of the power that the written word
would wield in the 20th century. They also shared a common problem: the
Associated Press' refusal to serve their newspapers.

In 1907, Scripps launched United Press to compete with the
monopolistic Associated Press, and just two years later, Hearst formed
International News Service to compete with AP and UP.

The story of how UP and INS battled the AP and each other until they
joined forces in 1959, is also a story of the men and women who wrote the
running history of the 20th century.

UNIPRESS, the biography of UPI, details the triumphs and
travesties of the individuals who brought competition and independence to
American journalism and made it the best in the world.

UPI White House Correspondent Merriman Smith was riding in the
front seat of the press car just four limousines behind President Kennedy on
Nov. 22, 1963, when he heard three shorts. In a split second, he grabbed the
car's only mobile phone. Then, as he watched the President's convertible sped
away from the motorcade, he dialed the UPI bureau in Dallas and dictated the
first words that alerted the world to the assassination of America's 35th
president.

"Smitty" held on with a grip of steel as his competition, AP's Jack
Bell riding in the rear seat of the press car, tried to get the phone away
and alert his office. But "Smitty," a fierce competitor, clung to the phone,
dictating details, even as Bell frantically beat on his back.

It was the start of what has been called the greatest reporting job in
America's journalism history. It was a high-water mark for United Press
International.

That competitive fire that drove Merriman Smith and the rest of UPI
was the legacy of a turn-of-the-century dandy who helped start the
never-ending war between AP and UPI.

Diminutive Roy Howard forged United Press in his own intense image as
he guided both United Press and the Scripps-Howard newspaper empire.

Like Merriman Smith, Howard lived to beat the AP and he was willing to
take a chance. His dramatic "beat" on the end of World War I touched off
celebrations around the world, but it stained forever his reputation and the
credibility of United Press.

Howard's "beat" was based on an official telegram announcing an
armistice sent to the commander of the American Navy in the French port of
Brest. But the telegram was premature and Howard's Flash was two days ahead
of the actual end of the war.

But the history of UPI is not just the big stories and the big names,
it's the achievements of people not famous, on stories long forgotten,
against huge odds and their strange addiction to working endless hours for
little money, even less fame, with flimsy resources and always against the
clock.

It's the story of the UPI staffer denied travel expenses hitch-hiking to
cover an execution, or a bureau manager requesting permission to send his
radio copy on a priority basis so he could go home and put out a fire in his
kitchen.

It's a story also of the incredible changes of the 20th Century, from the
dispatches on the Lindbergh kidnapping tapped out on Morse keys and Prince
Albert tobacco cans to the huge volumes of 1988 election copy collected in
computers and relayed by satellites to clients at 5,600 words a minute.

Those changes chronicled by UP and UPI "Around the World, Around the
Clock," played a large role in the rise and fall of the proud news agency,
from its start in 1907 until 1999 when its beleaguered managers announced
that UPI was leaving the wire service business and would seek new systems and
new markets.

UNIPRESS traces the fortunes of the world's first independent news
service from 1907 when E.W. Scripps launched the United Press with what he
called "a bag of wind" to the hurly-burly days of the 1960's when United
Press International successfully competed head-to-head with the older and
bigger Associated Press. And it examines the painful fall of UPI from the
heydays of the 1970s when nearly 7,000 newspapers and broadcast clients
subscribed to UPI services.

But the numbers don't tell the real story of UPI. Only those who became
"Unipressers" during the 92 years that UPI served journalism can do that.
This history lets those men and women tell the story.

The history tells how the world-wide news wholesaler operated, in
intimate detail provided by many of the 10,000 to 15,000 people who toiled
for the company at some time in their careers and are still proud of being
"Unipressers." It was, they usually say, the most memorable time of their
working days.

The many voices are needed to tell the real story of United Press
International, why so many were willing to do so much with so little and for
so little.

There was glamor and glory, but there was drudgery and disquiet. UPI's
people were eager for the glory and adept at the drudgery. They loved nothing
more than the big story, but they were always ready to take the daily
livestock market.

"UP is neither a charity nor a philanthropy. It is a business concern and
its members work for profit. But there is another motive that drives them
quite as strongly. You can call it pride of profession or professional zest
or enthusiasm or self-hypnosis. But, whatever you call it, it is as common to
the stockholding executives to the lunch-money copy boy --- it is indeed the
strongest of bonds that hold UP together. And what it boils down to, when the
sentiment and the wisecracks are both skimmed off, is an actual and genuine
love of the game."

E.W. Scripps, the founder of United Press, built his newspaper empire from
a shoestring. He started UP with, he said, a few dollars and "a bag of wind."
Yet, he said, it was the best thing he ever did.

Scripps is generally pictured as a maverick publisher, a political liberal
and friend of labor. This history discloses that he was, in reality, a
cunning, conservative businessman who happened to understand that most
newspaper readers were not capitalists.

E.W. advocated infanticide to limit the population, he demeaned women and
was a racial and religious bigot.

The dark side of E.W. Scripps has been overlooked by subsidized
biographers. It is not overlooked in UNIPRESS.

E.W., who rarely left his ranch at Miromar, was proud of the fact that
he had no hands-on relationships with his newspaper or UP. But he knew how to
get the most from others.

Scripps' business plan was simple. He gave underlings a stake in what he
called the "concern" -- always a minority stake -- which would have no
value until they paid for the shares with dividends they earned for
themselves and for him.

William Randolph Hearst, who founded the International News Service, was
the antitheses of the reclusive Scripps. He was born to immense wealth,
inherited his first newspaper, the San Francisco Examiner, and became totally
involved in running the paper. "Citizen" Hearst pioneered sensational news
coverage, later called "yellow journalism." One-sided reports in Hearst's
newspapers of Spanish atrocities in Cuba are generally credited with starting
the Spanish-American war.

The soul of United Press at the start was Roy Howard, the diminutive dynamo
who was the first general manager of the news agency. Given almost no
resources , Howard scratched like a cornered bobcat to get news and sell it.
He traveled the world, signing on clients in Europe, South America and Asia,
where all other new agencies were handcuffed by the cartel that Reuters
dominated.

Howard was always personally out in front, interviewing world leaders,
covering a boxing match, pleading with a publisher to by the UP wire. His
enthusiasm and enterprise, even his frugality, were infectious.

UNIPRESS provide intimate looks at those who followed Howard at the helm
of UP and later UPI.

The first was Carl Bickel, a dapper, well-bred gentleman who started his
journalism career by walking 35 miles to San Francisco to help cover the
great earthquake of 1906. He was president from 1922 to 1935. It was Bickel's
vision that saw the infant broadcasting industry as a vehicle for news as
well as entertainment.

After Bickel came Hugh Baillie, a formidable, crew-cut, Marine-like
battle tank. The one-time gun-toting crime reporter kept a bayonet as a paper
weight on his desk and directed United Press into what author Reynolds
Packard called "whambo-zambo" journalism, putting life and drama into news
coverage.

Frank Bartholomew (1955-1962) was the last of UPI's reporter-president.
He was an occassional correspondent at the front in World War II and Korea.
When he took over the presidency he had one burning obsession. He wanted to
get International News Service, Hearst's wire, and bring it into United
Press. He succeeded and UP became UPI in the spring of 1958.

After Bartholomew, UPI turned to the business side for its leadership,
spurred by a growing flow of red ink. First it was Mims Thomason and then Rod
Beaton, but neither could stop UPI's losses.

In 1982, Scripps Howard gave up on UPI and sold it for one dollar to two
men who called themselves "entrepreneurs," but had little experience as
managers and none in the business of producing and selling news.

Bill Geissler and Doug Ruhe picked Bill Small as their president, but the
former network news chief, shared their lack of knowledge in news wholesales
and soon the turnstyle to the top of UPI was spinning as fast as UPI was
plummeting toward oblivion. UPI had 13 chief executives in the 17 years after
UPI was sold.

UNIPRESS charts the influence of these men with the news events that
made the history of the 20th Century, but it digs much deeper into the
workings, the people and soul of UPI.